Mexico drug-war toll mounts

Officials: Nearly 12,500 have died so far in 2010

Dec. 17, 2010 12:00 AMLos Angeles Times

MEXICO CITY - More than 12,000 people have died this year in Mexico's drug war, officials said Thursday, making it the deadliest year since President Felipe Calderón launched a government crackdown against traffickers in 2006.

The federal attorney general's office said 12,456 people were killed through Nov. 30.

The overall death toll since the launch of the drug war is 30,196, according to figures released during a year-end breakfast with Attorney General Arturo Chavez Chavez.

That figure appeared to be low. Federal officials announced in August that 28,228 had been killed in the war, meaning the death rate would have to have slowed considerably since then. But there has been no sign of easing violence as cartels have remained locked in turf battles that have most contributed to the rising toll.

Estimates by Mexican intelligence put the death count at about 32,000.

The rising toll is a political drag on Calderón, who has sought to assure the public that the crackdown is depleting the cartels' power as they lose bosses to death and arrest.

Although the administration has contended that the vast majority of those killed are drug-gang henchmen, the bloodletting has left many Mexicans convinced that the government has lost control of entire regions, such as the northern border state of Tamaulipas.

In a recent survey by the Mitofsky polling firm, 59 percent of respondents said organized-crime groups were winning the war against federal forces. In a separate poll, 4 in 5 respondents said the country was more violent than a year before.

On Thursday, more than 30 business and civic groups took out full-page advertisements in newspapers pleading with the country's leaders to bring the mayhem under control.

Chavez said arrests and killings by Mexican forces of top underworld figures, including the reported slaying last week of a reputed drug lord in the western state of Michoacan, were taking a toll on the groups. Chavez said "a lot of evidence" suggested that Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, reputed leader of the La Familia group, was killed in skirmishing with federal forces, though no body was recovered. In November, marines killed Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, the reported leader of the Gulf cartel, during a battle in Tamaulipas.

"What is clear is that there is a significant weakening of these criminal structures," Chavez said.

Meanwhile, Chavez said officials had not found a fugitive lawmaker from Michoacan, Julio Cesar Godoy, who this week was stripped of congressional immunity from charges that he offered protection and laundered money for La Familia.